Appcelerator Survey on Mobile Development

In April 2013 Appcelerator surveyed over 6000 registered mobile developers to find out about their priorities and goals. One of the key findings is that mobile app development shifts toward business-to-employee and tablet platforms. You can download the report after a free registration.

From B2C to B2B/B2E

Historical data shows that the number of applications developed for enterprise needs is constantly rising. Whereas development for customer applications fell from 71% to 58% in the past 30 months, enterprise apps rose from 29% to 42%. The reason for this seems to be the fact that an enterprise only needs a small number of customer apps, but various apps for employees or partners.

Tablets on the Rise

The shift towards enterprise focused apps also explains the trend observed concerning the targeted form factors. For iOS and Windows platforms, there is now roughly equal interest in building apps for smart-phones or tablets. Within Android, smart-phones are still the dominant form factor.

iOS still Top Platform

With regard to developer interest, iPhones and iPads still have the highest ranking with well over 80%. Android follows at nearly 80% for phones and about 65% for tablets. At the same level, developers are interested in creating applications based on HTML5. The remaining platforms (Windows, Blackberry, Kindle Fire) range between 10% and nearly 40%. Firefox OS entered the statistics in April at 25%. The average developer is writing apps for 2.5 operating systems.

Interest in the Windows platform still remains comparatively low. Whereas the customers' prime reason for this is the lack of applications, developers don't want to develop applications because of lacking support from Microsoft.

About Appcelerator

The organizer of the survey, Appcelerator, offers a complete mobile-first application development stack, including a development environment, application frameworks and cloud-based back-end services. Developers can create native or HTML5/JavaScript based applications.